Two things really.

1. Tradition. Alcohol has a long history in European culture and by immigration the United States. It’s common to have a glass of wine or a beer with dinner, the rich will impress their friends with the extravagant alcohol they drink serve, you take a glass of wine at communion… heck at one point weak beers were drunk more than water, because at the time nobody knew what made water safe to drink but everyone could tell if beer smelled rotten.

2. Production. Marijuana is easy to grow, but it takes a lot of time and space to produce. Alcohol on the other hand you need something with sugar and some yeast or starter. It can be fermented in some corner of the basement or even a cupboard. It’s so hard to control the production of alcohol even in prisons there’s usually somebody fermenting pruno somewhere and that’s one of the most controlled and monitored environments. It’s really hard to prevent people from brewing some form of alcohol because it’s about as easy as making bread.

When you combine these two you end up with the disaster that occurred when the United States tried to ban alcohol during prohibition. An easy to produce intoxicant with a large market was suddenly banned, when people started looking for more organized crime stepped in to fill the void.

I’d say for two reasons. First, laws are written by a bunch of old people (at least in the head) that love the stuff. Second, full prohibition does not work anyway.

This is a non-US perspective, but my take is this:

Alcohol production has a long and rich history. Many cultures, in particular western, have their own relationships to alcohol. The development of different alcohol production processes tells a lot about the history of a culture.

Belgian monks with their beer brewing styles. Scotch whiskey. French wine yards. Even Japanese with their sake.

Remove wine from France, and we will have another French Revolution with guillotines again. It’s difficult to remove something that’s so heavily ingrained in the culture without public outrage. Alcohol is part of the identity.

Few cultures have marijuana as part of their identity, hence it’s easier to ban.

Dolla dolla bill

Because you’re not voting in the right people.

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Lobbyists.

We tried banning it, it didn’t really end too well, as it was still available but funded a lot of organized crime, but apparently we didn’t learn our lesson when it comes to other drugs. It’s also not really practical to control as making it, in at least some form or another, is too easy. Even weed requires you have seeds from a specific plant to produce it, whereas a huge, huge variety of foods cab be fermented. It’s also got a lot of cultural relevance and history to it that make people think of it as different from other drugs

Because so many people are addicted to it, even the lawmakers are addicted to it. And as other commenters have said, we tried prohibition in the past and it did not work. Society lost their collective minds.

because we already made it illegal, and we saw what happened. Weed is just the natural successor to that.

You can’t make cheaper paper with alcohol.

Years and years and years of lobbying. Also taxes.

They tried prohibition, didn’t work.

The way I see it: Alcohol is an older drug, it was engrained in society. But the new drug marijuana could be cracked down on. Also because it was hippies that smoked marijuana, but everyone drank alcohol.

*Lock Stock had a scene. “Want a tug on that? [joint]”. Reply: “No I don’t want any of that horrible shit. Can we go get drunk now?”

Tradition, mainly. It’s so ingrained in the majority of cultures that you can’t simply uproot it with a law. Although it should be a more controlled substance, no doubt about that. It’s addictive, debilitating, incredibly harmful and it simply destroys more lives than literally any drug known to man.